Four people qualified to seek a Harlem City Council position in the November nonpartisan election. Seats occupied by Councilmen John Thigpen and Rudolph Dixon are up for re-election on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Thigpen, 53, a chemical senior engineer at DSM Chemical in Augusta, has served on the council since 2003 and qualified to see his fourth term on the council. Dixon, 88, a retired Methodist minister, qualified to run for his seventh since his service began after his 1994 retirement.

Greenbrier Middle School sixth-graders Connor Sartain and Zachary Lyons huddled over Lyons’ Kindle looking up definitions and origins of words during a vocabulary lesson.

Such a sight could be the new look of education in Columbia County.

As part of the Bring Your Own Technology program, students are allowed to use cell phones and other wireless devices in classrooms to enhance learning. Columbia County School System officials are just beginning to implement the program that allows children to have a world of information at their fingertips.

Three people qualified this week to seek a seat on the Grovetown City Council in the November nonpartisan election.

Seats occupied by Lee Briggs and Bruce Stoddard are up for re-election on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Briggs, 39, is a John Deere operations manager. He was appointed Aug. 12 to fill the more than four months remaining of former Councilman Sonny McDowell’s term. He resigned in April after being convicted of federal bribery charges.

Stoddard, who has served 12 years on the council, is no seeking re-election.

A Columbia County grand jury indicted the former treasurer of an Evans neighborhood association on felony theft charges after she was accused in May of stealing more than a quarter-million dollars from the organization.

Columbia County’s sole Catholic church will soon be the largest in the entire diocese.

St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church officially broke ground Monday on an $11 million expansion that will make it the largest Cath­olic church in the Diocese of Savannah.

What began as a small group of families that meet in living rooms of homes in Augusta’s Montclair neighborhood more than 30 years ago, has grown to more than 1,800 families and is still growing, church officials said.

The following accounts were taken from Columbia County Sheriff’s Office incident reports:

Intruder leaves powder tracks

An Evans woman recently told authorities that she has evidence that someone has been coming into her apartment while she’s at work.

The 56-year-old woman said that on Aug. 20, someone came into her apartment and stole $50 worth of pain patches. She called the front desk of her apartment complex on Old Evans Road and confirmed no maintenance personnel were scheduled to be in her home.